Being the leader of the free world is really, really hard stuff

If you needed proof that Barack Obama began messing up his presidency in his first week — and may I say that you do not — you should have seen Austan Goolsbee, economist and die-hard Obama fan, on The Daily Show in June.

If you needed proof that Barack Obama began messing up his presidency in his first week — and may I say that you do not — you should have seen Austan Goolsbee, economist and die-hard Obama fan, on The Daily Show in June.

He was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and in previous interviews he’d struck me as mildly depressed, presumably because he didn’t get Tim Geithner’s Treasury job in 2008.

But Goolsbee practically danced into Jon Stewart’s lap. He was fizzing with the kind of happiness you expect to see in someone whose ransom cheque has just been cleared by Somali pirates. He’d just quit his job and was heading back to Chicago to teach or some damn thing, adios sayonara goodbye.

Now you read Ron Suskind’s new and extraordinary exposé, Confidence Men, about how Obama dribbled away his first two years in power, and Goolsbee’s tripping the light fantastic suddenly makes sense.

Obama’s White House is a place where good and smart people go to get broken by the loud and the (allegedly clever) thick. It may have already finished off Obama, who has taken on that bullied, inappropriately-touched-child look, which is weird in a man whose hair is fast turning grey.

Obama wasn’t ready to be president, Suskind says, and he showed it by hiring the Clintonite financial deregulation boys, specifically Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff and, worst, National Economic Council director Larry Summers (“who, I think by unanimous consent, is an asshole,” Stewart recently confided to a smiling Suskind). Thrilled to be elected, Obama didn’t know if he wanted to fix the economy or health care, and left it up to committees composed of puffed-up boiler-room salesmen to tell him, and to do it their way.

Think of the economic crisis as a monster from Alien juddering out of Wall Street’s stomach. Think of the sad, rusty weaponry Obama assembled for the fight.

Summers was a confident man with little to be confident about beyond his capacity to shout people down, argue with reality in the belief he could defeat it, charge huge speaking fees, and basically ruin things (imagine having invested Harvard’s endowment in derivatives).

He was proof of “the difference between wisdom and smarts,” as Suskind put it damningly.

In other words, he was your standard Washington guy, a Kissinger or Cheney type.

He was part of the team that deregulated finance in the early ’90s, blocked the regulation of killer derivatives in 1998 (and famously destroying brave regulator Brooksley Born, who foresaw the catastrophe), hastened Wall Street’s descent into casinoship, and ruined your life, not to put too fine a point on it.

Emanuel was just a thug. “He’s aggressive, he’s emotional, he’s moody,” Obama once said of him, Suskind correctly asking why these would be desirable qualities in the Oval Office gatekeeper.

As for the chinless wonder Geithner, he was a fumbler from the beginning and, according to Suskind, went on to deliberately defy Obama’s orders. I wait daily for Obama to get rid of him — it is not apparent to me that he can survive the publication of this book — and if he isn’t gone by next weekend . . .

These men passed muster in the Miracle-Gro economy of the Clinton era, but in the worst global economic crisis since the Depression, they killed everything they touched. “Tim was our man in Washington,” said one of the big bankers Obama called to a crisis meeting for a scolding that didn’t happen. With Geithner there, they had nothing to fear.

It’s a great quote. Suskind has baskets of them, and that’s testimony to how bad things are. People were lining up to talk to Suskind, many of them on the record, and that’s not normal halfway through a presidency.

Interestingly, they were all male. Obama shunned women as senior staffers and allowed those he had to be treated so badly that they held a women’s summit to demand redress. Nothing changed.

The women, accustomed to being the lone courageous voices in the room, were the ones speaking up for reform. “Why is it always the women?” one prominent staffer said. “Why are we the only ones with balls around here?”

The smart and charismatic Elizabeth Warren was supposed to head a consumer protection bureau, the kind of thing that might have given Democratic voters some hope that the White House was on the side of desperate citizens, not billionaires. That includes the citizens being tormented by police on the New York streets as I write this.

Obama’s men killed off the idea. Obama left Warren twisting in the most humiliating way possible. In a way, the women made the same mistake Obama did, underestimating how much they were hated.

Home alone. There’s no one in charge. I’m not even going to get into Obama’s endless toadying to Tea Baggers and Republicans who despise him. I accept that Obama is ruthless in his pragmatism.

What I don’t get is why he threw away his Get Out of Jail Free card — his first two years with Senate-Congressional majorities — with both hands. Suskind’s hard-working book makes a convincing case that Obama has no management talent. But it’s worse than that. It’s that Obama appears to believe in nothing.

Yet he campaigns so beautifully. (Offstage, the sounds of global sobbing. Nobel judges, the unemployed, the middle class, hope-and-changers, etc.)

Here’s what Obama said to Suskind after being confronted with charges of criminal stupidity. Brace yourself.

“But I don’t think, it’s not clear to me — and I’ll have to reflect on this at some point — it’s not clear to me that that was necessarily because of a management problem, as it was that this is really hard stuff.”

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